Through refinements in circuit design and semiconductor processing methodologies it has now become possible to integrate in a monolithic miniaturized packaging scheme substantially all of the components of which an RF communication system may be configured. As the demand for higher operational frequencies and bandwidth utilization has increased, however, the use of a high performance support substrate (e.g. GaAs) as both a signal processing environment and a radiation site has been limited by the size of and the unwanted mutual coupling between the antenna elements and the components of adjacent signal processing networks. As a consequence, separate support structures are conventionally employed for the antenna elements and the microwave chip carriers that contain the signal processing circuitry, yielding an overall packaging scheme that is largesized and therefore not necessarily optimized for use with complex communication/avionics equipment such as that incorporated in high performance military aircraft.